The countdown to the Oscars got underway on Wednesday as nomination ballots for February's Academy Awards were mailed to the 5,829 voters who will decide the US film world's winners and losers for this year, a statement said.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members must return their ballots to auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers by 5pm, Jan. 12, exactly 10 days before the nominees are revealed in Beverly Hills.
A second round of ballots will be mailed after the nominations are announced to determine the winners of the 2007 Oscars, which will be presented at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre on Feb. 24.
Next year's Oscars race is shaping up to be one of the most open in years, with no single film so far emerging as the clear front-runner early in the movie industry's awards season.
Awards pundits believe a clutch of films are in contention for top honors, including romantic drama Atonement, gritty crime thriller No Country for Old Men and gruesome musical Sweeney Todd.
Also on Wednesday, Baghdad's international film festival opened in a hotel on Wednesday in another sign of how improved security is bringing life back to the city.
There was even a red carpet rolled out, but guests to the event last held in 2005 had to be body-searched three times before they were allowed to walk down it.
Despite a sharp drop in violence in Iraq since June, the directors of the 40 foreign films at the festival stayed away. Some were keen to come but were discouraged by organizers, anxious to avoid any risk of the event grabbing headlines for all the wrong reasons.
"Some of the directors wanted to come because of Baghdad's improved security, but we don't want to be surprised (by an attack). Hopefully they will attend in the future," Ammar al-Aradi, the event's organizer said.
A security crackdown by US and Iraqi forces has helped to curb violence between majority Shiite and Sunni Muslims that turned the city's streets into sectarian killing fields. People have begun to venture out again, going to restaurants and parks.
Out of the 61 films competing for medals at the biennial film festival, there are 21 Iraqi entries, mostly short films and documentaries, many of which portray Iraq's woes.
Some of the films portray aspects of the sectarian violence that left the country on the verge of civil war last year, while several documentaries focus on ancient archaeological sites and the state of Iraq's southern marshlands.
The film festival, which includes films by French and Belgian directors, was held in the Palestine hotel in central Baghdad and attracted several hundred people and more than a dozen media channels.
The hotel is surrounded by concrete blast walls and guests were frisked three times before reaching the large conference hall where the event was held.
But organizers had other worries besides security on their minds.
Midway through the screening of the first film, a short Iraqi production about a man paranoid of the violence that surrounds him, one of Baghdad's frequent power cuts left the audience in the dark for a few minutes.
The festival was organized on a shoestring budget and well-known Iraqi actor Mazin Mohammed Mustafa said more funding was needed for local film-makers to develop Iraqi cinema.
The Indian filmmaker and director G.P. Sippy, whose 1975 blockbuster Sholay (Embers) remains the most famous Hindi-language movie and the biggest commercial success for Bollywood, died on Tuesday in Mumbai. He was 93.
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